Discovering a new life after 32 years in classrooms as a teacher and principal

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Dark Days Challenge - Week 7 Report

This has been a week of borrowing ideas from locavore writers - Barbara Kingsolver and two local eating bloggers. Because I have very little shame, I decided to spotlight our homemade pizza for this week's report Dark Days check in. The only reason for any shame is that the crust of the pizza shared some of the less fine qualities of cardboard. On the other hand, some of the toppings came to the pizza from our garden via the freezer and I am very proud of making that small first step of saving some of the food we'd grown to be able to use it this time of year. Please see the lastpost for a description of the mostly local pizza dinner. Many thanks to the kind folks who are offering suggestions via comments. Any advice or tips are welcome to advance the cause of my next attempt.

In addition to that meal, I found some other ideas to borrow while reading the Dark Days reports and other blogs. These were actually much more successful and got favorable reviews from friends and family.

"Late Bloomer" at Soccer Moms and Single Chicks wrote about their Christmas morning breakfast casserole in her Dark Days report last week. It looked and sounded so good that I made it for our New Years brunch. I made a couple of modifications - using the suggestion of cooking the potatoes first, adding green peppers and onions to them and also used less sausage than suggested.

3 comments:

Joan - glad to hear the casserole went well. How was the potato crust? That's how I think I'll do it next time too.I didn't get a food post up this week, but I did manage to create an unmitigated disaster out of a whole wheat bread recipe. :-(I may try to make bread soup with it... (saw the recipe on another blog).

Ack, I've been bad about the recipe! I promise, I'll go back and post it, or put it in my comment to your next post. It's there, really! :-)

I love roasting/cooking potatoes before adding them to the dish they are supposed to go in. Lots of flavor that way it seems. And the cake, I love cranberries. Do you know a way to sub out for the butter (that I can't eat)? I'm set on the egg sub, and would like to give the recipe a try!

Late Bloomer: Yes, it is a good idea to have ways to use up bread that isn't ready for prime time. If it were summer and fresh tomatoes were available, it might work in a bread salad, but the soup seems like a better idea this time of year.Living: have you tried soy butter? I haven't used it, but have friends who are allergic to dairy who use it, including in desserts.

A few of the others that I read regularly

About Me

Beginning to learn all kinds of new things, tricks or otherwise, in Portland, Oregon. After leaving a 60+ hour a week job as principal of a PreK-8 school and moving into semi-retirement, I am finding that I can still learn lots of new things. Some examples: eating more locally produced foods, taking a singing class, and blogging. Next up: learn to knit.